Indoor and Outdoor LED Stair Lighting

Instructables member ElJefeUno brought an awesome electronics project of building an Infra-red (IR) light trip sensor to light up your stairway. The sensor uses a directional IR LED beamed at a sensor that shoots past where you’ll walk. When you interrupt the light from the LED, the LEDs turn on for a period of time …

Fiberopticlight presents an amazing step lights created using Poly Optics Super Side Light fibre lit with LEDs at each end. Each strip of stairs consists of a single LED at each end of a 7mm Super Side Light fibre strip encased in a 10mm square polycarbonate extrusion. Entire system of strip lights is typically operated by just …

The shadow gap technique has been expanded and developed on minimalist staircase. An amazing effect is created by letting the light through the gaps between the wall and the stairs. More such designs at lightiq.

Grobenn25 built an interactive LED handrail system using an Arduino that monitors a large array of infrared sensors to detect what step the user is on. Based on the current detection pattern the stairs will light the LEDs under the handrail appropriately. During the production he looked at many different types of systems and …

With Ecoglo’s arena stair lighting now you can keep your fans safe and secure. This arena stair lighting is built to prevent trips, slips and falls, as well as light the way in an emergency. Custom designs of these glow-in-the-dark strips can also be made available that fits to any set of steps, and guaranteed to add a whole new level …

Mike Szczys from Hack a Day shares a hack that he found by Geert on his Just a Thought blog. Geert wanted to jazz up his stairs but adding some DIY RGB LED stair lighting. He used an Arduino Uno for the brain and some TI TLC5940 chips to do the heavy lifting of doing the PWM (pulse width modulation) for all of the channels of LEDs.

“We need a lot of PWM controllers. With 12 steps, 3 colours per step, we need 36 PWM channels. My Arduino Uno only has 6 of them, so that’s not an option. Texas Intruments has a solution: TLC5940, a 16 channel PWM unit with 12 bit duty cycle control. It has a serial input, and can be daisy chained to create even more channels. In this case, I need 3. Luckily there is a library for this chip in the Arduino Playground”

Instructables member ganglion from England installed some LED stair lighting on his stairs. He built a custom DIY circuit that allows the lights to be dimmed. To make things a bit simpler he decided to only light every second step and simply run the wires on the edge of the stairs from top to bottom.

We have seen other stair lighting systems like this one that have the wires run in a small channel down the edge of the stairs. This allows the wires to be hidden without the need for drilling holes in the walls and fishing the wires in the walls to power.

“The bit I was pleased with was working out a circuit that lets you use the same pair of cables for the LED power and for the switch signal from the top box. By the time I decided I wanted both switches, I’d already soldered the LEDs (plus resistors) into a two core piece of mains flex, so getting the switch signal back down the cable to the main box took a bit of thought. In the end I found a way of shorting the power very briefly through a capacitor, and detecting the current pulse using a comparator. The signal from this goes to a toggle flipflop, which switches the power on and off.”

This LED Stair Lighting Controller will make your home look amazing. The idea is to control two sensory infrared “beams”–a lower beam for the bottom step and another at the top of the stairs. Whenever the beam detects something interrupts (like feet) then the stairs light up, and after a 15 second delay, the lights will then automatically turn off. This install was done with custom blue 5mm LEDs, the typical LED lights are 10mm white. You can purchase the stair lighting controller kit here.

Watch the video below to see how impressive this system looks in dark lighting conditions.

The Eagle schematic file is here and the Arduino Processing environment can be found here. You can edit this to add more lights, or to use a different lighting sequence. This code uses the Lightuino source code to drive the M5451.